The Up-Down (8 page)

 

 

3

It was two o'clock in the morning and Pace was lying in Marnie's bed listening to Etta Jones sing “Don't Go to Strangers” on the radio. “When you need more than company,” she suggested, “don't go to strangers, come on to me.” Pace had always loved this song and Etta's tangy delivery, the way she let it curl gently into the night air. He also dug Skeeter Best's dignified guitar solo, not subtle but unobtrusive, just right, which was the way Pace felt this very moment. It was the first time he'd been able to relax since the insane series of events occasioned by his dealings with the Pasternak sisters. A remarkably cool breeze from the river snaked in through the slightly open bedroom window, causing Pace to pull a sheet up over his chest. The thought hit him that he had not felt really peaceful since leaving N.O., and he had to come back to get it. Etta Jones' final soft figure segued into Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson on tenor playing “This'll Get To Ya” with Brother Jack McDuff filling on organ. Marnie was downstairs in the kitchen making omelettes for them. They had not eaten dinner, having fallen deeply asleep after making love. Pace savored the moment. Craziness was never far from home, wherever that might be, but you didn't have to sign up for it. He closed his eyes and shivered a little from the breeze. When he reopened them, Marnie, completely naked except for a leopard print scarf tied around her neck, walked through the doorway holding two plates.

“Guess what, darlin'?” she said. “Day after tomorrow I'm puttin' you to work in the bakery.”

 

 

4

Pace didn't have much time to write. He'd never baked a cake in his life, so he had to learn from scratch. Marnie put him to work making Magdalena Kowalski's Krakow yellow cake, named after her mother, from Magdalena's recipe. Pace enjoyed doing the basic preparation, measuring the dry ingredients, sifting the cake flour, then re-sifting it with the baking powder and salt, creaming the butter and sugar, adding egg yolks (never the whole egg), vanilla and grated lemon rind—using both, Marnie explained, was her mother's secret—and adding the sifted ingredients to the butter mixture in three parts with thirds of milk. After Pace had poured this into pans prepared with parchment and put them into the oven, he left the filling and frosting to Marnie or her second in command, Dolores Silva, a native of Jalisco, Mexico, who had lived illegally in the United States for forty years, since she was ten. Her parents and grandparents had all been great cooks and passed their collective culinary knowledge on to Dolores. Marnie told Pace that Dolores made the best white pozole on the planet, and he was eager to try it whether or not he had a hangover.

While Marnie went swimming in the afternoons, Pace usually took a nap, then wrote for a couple of hours before having a cocktail with her. They had dinner together and went to bed early. After four weeks of this routine, Pace felt renewed, the poison of the previous months having drained from his system almost entirely. Other than taking Milk and Honey out to run in Toni Jones Park behind Dillard University, Marnie and Pace stayed close to home. This suited Pace and he and Marnie got along with “nary a ripple” as she said old Elsie Buell would have put it.

Pace was awakened from his nap on a Thursday afternoon by Marnie, who came into the bedroom holding a sheet of paper and an envelope. She sat down in a rocking chair next to the bed and shook her head from side to side.

“What's up, Marn? Why aren't you at the Y?”

“Special delivery letter arrived just as I was goin' out the door. Digger got blown up by an incendiary explosive device along with three other guys in a jeep on the outskirts of Kabul. Those three are dead. Digger survived but he lost a leg—it doesn't say which one—and was permanently blinded. He's already in D.C. at a rehab center. They're gonna release him this Saturday and fly him to N.O. I've got to take him in, Pace. He's got no place else to go.”

“Of course you do.”

“It says in the letter that he'll continue his rehabilitation at the VA hospital here, but he can live at home. I'm afraid this puts an A-number one crimp in our own arrangement, at least for the time bein'.”

Marnie's eyes were full of tears; certainly for poor Digger, but probably, Pace thought, partially for the abrupt cessation of his and her newfound idyll.

“What's Digger's real name?” he asked.

“Francisco Madero Bernstein. His daddy was a scholar of the Mexican revolution. Taught at Stanford University, I believe.”

“You'll visit me sometime in North Carolina, I hope.”

Marnie smiled and let her tears fall.

“Of course I will, darlin'.”

“If you let me know when you're comin',” Pace said, “I'll bake a cake.”

 

 

5

Since childhood Pace had been interested in people's stories about their interaction with extraterrestrials. Most of these accounts were ludicrous if not patently ridiculous, of course, but occasionally someone sounded convinced that he or she had actually been contacted by or had some sort of relation with emissaries from planets other than Earth. Pace rarely read science fiction or watched television shows or movies that involved space travel. What fascinated him was personal testimony, hearing people talk about their intimate experiences with aliens. Usually these individuals could be heard on radio programs in the middle of the night, telling how small gray or tall blue beings, some without mouths or with three eyes, had appeared in barns on isolated farms or kidnapped the subject and taken him to their own planet to experiment upon. Often these witnesses or participants sounded so sincere that Pace knew they believed what they were saying. Delusional or not, Pace remained curious as to what transpired in these people's minds to allow them to describe in such vivid detail their unearthly experiences.

Sitting at the desk in his cottage late at night, or lying awake in bed, Pace acknowledged to himself that he would not mind having an encounter of the third kind, as such contacts were called. If he was taken away to another galaxy it would unburden him from trying to figure out a reason for existence. Not that he expected to be given or have revealed to him an explanation; it would be enough, Pace decided, to know there was more than one answer or no answer. Pace did not believe in God, he never had, but he understood why doing so was a comfort to so many people. He just enjoyed the idea of going somewhere else, someplace unimaginable.

When he received a letter from Marnie three months after he'd returned to Bay St. Clement, telling him that she had married Digger and was bound to devote herself to his well-being for however long that might be, Pace was not surprised, but for a moment he wished he were on another planet.

 

 

6

Pace was walking through a field of high grass in the woods a quarter of a mile from Dalceda Delahoussaye's house on a cold, cloudy December day, thinking about what most significantly could have occupied Lula's thoughts during her last fifteen years, the ones without Sailor. His parents' undying trust in one another was what Pace admired most about them. There were certain people he trusted, of course, Marnie being one, and he had trusted his ex-wife, Rhoda, too; but it was not the same because the bond between Sailor and Lula had endured what for them had been forever.

A six-point buck came thundering through the grass and passed from right to left directly in front of Pace. Before its odor reached his nostrils and before he heard the shot, a bullet entered just to the right and slightly below Pace's left shoulder blade. He turned and saw a man wearing eyeglasses and an orange hat with earflaps about fifty yards behind him. The man was holding a rifle. He stood still for a few seconds, then began running away from Pace, toward a dense thicket. Pace reached around with his right hand and tried to touch the spot where the projectile had penetrated his back but he could not find it. Before he fell, Pace looked again for the man wearing an orange hat but he was gone. Lying in the tall grass, Pace stared up at the gathering grey clouds and thought, if ever there were a time for him to be abducted by aliens, this was it.

 

 

7

The supervising nurse in the critical care unit of Nuestra Hermana de Perdón Hospital in South Nazareth, where Pace had been taken to recover from his wounds, was named Anita O'Day O'Shea, whom everyone on the hospital staff called Lady O. Lady O was seventy-six years old and in her fifty-fifth year of service. Still vigorous, sharp-minded and tart-tongued as ever, her expertise was well-respected by doctors and nurses alike. It was she who oversaw Pace's case and was the only person with whom he was allowed by the doctors to have a conversation. These exchanges were necessarily brief and consisted mostly of Lady O's relating to Pace her theory regarding spacecraft having landed on Earth thousands of years before, as recorded in the Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament.

“Ezekiel was a son of Bunzi, a priest, and he witnessed the heavens open and from out of a fiery cloud came an amber-colored spaceship. Four four-winged creatures appeared, walking upright, each with four faces: one a man's, one a lion's, one an ox's, and one an eagle's. Their vehicle was metallic and formed in the shape of a wheel. When Ezekiel told the elders of Israel about this visitation, they refused to believe him and he was exiled to Babylonia. Mind you, this was around 600 B.C., so there's the first reliable proof that men from outer space been checkin' out our planet since forever. You feelin' better today, son?”

The bullet that pierced Pace had traveled through his back into his heart and exited from his chest. That he had survived was, in the words of the head surgeon at Nuestra Hermana de Perdón, a freak event. Lady O called it a miracle, a sign that God had plans for Pace.

“This is His way of tellin' you you got work left to do, Mr. Ripley,” said Lady O. What that might be, I can't pretend to know, but He don't spare folks for no bad reason.”

“I don't consider myself a Christian,” Pace told her. “I don't hold much for organized religion of any kind, though I respect your beliefs and I am thoroughly grateful for your encouragement as well as your ministrations and devotion to my well-being.”

During the earliest stage of his recovery, Pace had been under heavy sedation and had experienced an alternately entertaining and troubling, if not horrifying at times, series of dreams. In one, he found himself being devoured by an enormous crocodile, helpless to prevent it; but then Pace became the crocodile, gorging himself on a Chinese girl, a child, really, swallowing her head first, watching her legs kick until her top parts were chomped to bits. In another, Pace was in a city that was a combination of Paris, France, and Chicago; it was winter, snow was falling, and he wandered through the dimly-lit streets until he saw a woman he thought was Siempre Desalmado getting into a taxi. Pace ran after the taxi but he could not catch up. It disappeared and he fell down in the road and was soon covered by snow.

When at last his dreams became less intense, Pace forced himself to recall what happened, that he had been gunned down in the woods in a hunting accident but had somehow survived. When Lady O asked Pace if a bullet through his heart could not kill him, what could? Sailor and Lula's only child said, “That's not the only question I don't have the answer to.”

 

 

8

Pace spent five weeks in the hospital before returning to Bay St. Clement. A private caregiver, Addie Mae Longbow, a septuagenarian, half-Cherokee woman who had worked with Lady O for a number of years before retiring from full-time nursing, attended Pace for almost a month, after which time he was able to take care of himself. Though still not at full strength, Pace got around well enough, he could drive and prepare his own meals. He resumed writing but resolved to do something for the good of others, to devote a portion of what energy he had to charity work. This desire did not stem from any righteous or empty feeling; it was just that Pace felt a considerable amount of disgust at what he deemed selfish, wasteful and narcissistic behavior, including his own. Fear, he concluded, was what drove people to behave as they did, and fear took many forms. Pace could not claim to be free of fear, but for whatever reason he felt less afraid than he ever had before.

Addie Mae Longbow was a member of an organization based in a warehouse in North Nazareth called Jesus Sees Us, which fed, clothed and provided free medical care to anyone in need. Pace donated three afternoons and evenings a week to Jesus Sees Us, serving lunch and dinner. It was while dishing up mashed potatoes and gravy on a Thursday evening three months after he had begun helping out there that Pace recognized the man wearing glasses and an orange hat with earflaps who had shot him.

Pace said nothing to the man as he passed in the serving line and then carried his food tray to a table, where he sat down and began to eat. Pace had had only a momentary glimpse of the delinquent hunter, but was certain this was he. As Pace continued to dole out potatoes, he kept an eye on the person who had plugged him and fled, trying to decide what to do. When the man in the orange hat finished eating and got up to go, Pace noticed that both of the lenses in his eyeglasses had cracks in them and that his green army field jacket was torn and dirty. As Pace watched him walk out of the dining area, the tension that had overcome him upon spotting the man gradually drained from his body. Pace felt not unlike he imagined Lazarus must have once he understood that he was truly again among the living.

“Mister, ain't you gonna spoon me some of them smashed 'taters?”

Pace looked at the stooped old woman in the line standing across from him, waiting to be served. Her deeply creased face and grizzled gray hair were filthy but there remained a distinct beam of brightness in her chestnut eyes.

“I surely am, ma'am,” Pace said, scooping potatoes onto her plate. “Do you want gravy?”